Track Your Favorite Shows On Your iPad With TeeVee 3

I recently took pains to re-establish my IMDB account to track all the movies and shows I actually want to see. This has been working well for movies, but it’s inelegant for tracking TV episodes because there’s no easy way to mark an episode as “watched”. I track movies by adding them to a watchlist and then removing them once I’ve seen them, but it’s just too much work for individual episodes. Thankfully, TeeVee 3 is perfectly set up for this kind of task.

I stumbled upon this app recently thanks to a post on Beautiful Pixels, and it’s quite a looker. Its layout is reminiscent of recent Windows software, so you’ll find a lot of thin lines and highlighted text functioning as the primary means of navigation. TeeVee 3 feels open and fresh as a result, and the backdrops and cast shots serve as part of the UI.

The first launch of the app presents you with a set of posters, each one representing a TV show you may be interested in. I scrolled through a few pages and tapped on a few titles, then conducted a text search for a few series that weren’t in the initial poster lineup. That was the entirety of the setup process, and it took less than two minutes.

TeeVee 3 can send notifications as each new episode in a series airs, but I’ve turned that off. What I really want this app for is for tracking my progress through all the shows I’ve been meaning to watch, and it does this very well. Tapping on the first episode of “24” S09E01 prompted me to mark that and all previous episodes as “watched”. iCloud sync is also remarkably well done. I downloaded TeeVee 3 on my iPad, set it up, and then installed the app on my iPhone and watched as all of my shows populated my phone screen.

The only thing that could work better is the Cast section. You aren’t able to check the cast members for a particular episode, and although you can see the top-billed cast, you won’t be able to find out anything else about them. I don’t think these are necessary details for TeeVee 3 to be functional and helpful, but they do feel like a bit of a missed opportunity to be a one-stop shop for TV series lookups.

Tracking TV shows isn’t stressful, but TeeVee 3 makes the experience so easy and fun that you’ll end up wanting to use the app to do it for you. It’s currently $3 on the App Store.

My name is probably Thomas (yes, it is). I'll be able to help you figure out why Evernote isn't syncing, or recommend your favourite new RSS reader to you. That's partly because I am enamoured with the iOS ecosystem and hardware, but mostly because I'm Canadian.